Paul Egglestone

MoJo in Action: The use of mobiles in conflict, community and cross platform Journalism

As citizen journalism and social media continue to influence and shape the global media landscape, and as smartphone technology becomes increasingly prevalent and affordable, this paper details four international smartphone-centric case studies that utilize a beta-stage editorial commissioning platform and accompanying smartphone. The study comes as increasing numbers of news organizations and citizen journalism tools harness the power of smartphones to both collect and publish editorial content. This paper examines the potential for community, student, and professional reporters to collate and transmit media via a tailored publishing platform provide and asks whether this platform can create a seamless link between smartphone content production and newsroom-based operations. It outlines considerations for future platform development and potential design methodologies to facilitate improved content capture methods, making the case for ongoing and collaborative co-design. UCLans School of Journalism, through the RCUK-funded Bespoke Project, trialled Nokia Research Centers technology with community users, professional journalists, and student reporters between 2009 and 2011.Test locations included Fort Bastion, Afghanistan, rural Kenya, and Preston and Manchester in the UK. This paper also investigates the tension created when incorporating new platforms with pre-existing newsflows, and looks forward to a newsroom ecosystem where mobile phones are integrated within standard working practices.

Designing interactive newsprint

The possibility of linking paper to digital information is enhanced by recent developments in printed electronics. In this article we report the design and evaluation of a local newspaper augmented with capacitive touch regions and an embedded Bluetooth chip working with an adjunct device. These allowed the interactive playback of associated audio and the registration of manual voting actions on the web. Design conventions inherited from paper and the web were explored by showing four different versions of an interactive newspaper to 16 community residents. The diverse responses of residents are described, outlining the potential of the approach for local journalism and recommendations for the design of interactive newsprint. Interactive newsprint can be authored to include audio information and voting.Interactive paper can be designed and experienced at four different levels.Audio can add personality and authenticity to printed news.Printed and online news might be combined in new ways through interactive newsprint.

Utilising insight journalism for community technology design

We describe the process of insight journalism, in which local amateur journalists were used to generate unique insights into the digital needs of a community. We position this as a means for communities to represent themselves to designers, both as a method of designing community technologies and as a first step towards supporting innovation at a local level. To demonstrate insight journalism, we present two case studies of community technologies that were directly inspired, informed and evaluated by journalistic content. Based on this experience, we evaluate the role that insight journalism can play in designing for communities, the particular characteristics that it lends to the design process and how it might be employed to support sustainable community innovation.

Finding "real people": trust and diversity in the interface between professional and citizen journalists

The increase of social media and web blogs has enabled a new generation of citizen journalism to provide new perspectives into local communities. However traditional news organisations are currently struggling to incorporate this new form of journalism into their existing organisational workflow. We present an analysis from 10 interviews with professional journalists and explore the current issues faced by professional journalists when searching for reliable and reputable local news sources as well as the perceived role of citizen journalists within a large news organisation. From this analysis we present a set of design implications for building systems that support interaction between citizen and professional journalists in order to encourage participatory news production and diversify national news perspectives.

UKKO: Enriching Persuasive Location based Games with Environmental Sensor Data

The number of children walking to school is at an all-time low and car use on the rise. The walk to school is seen as an opportunity to promote exercise and tackle the effects of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle amongst young people. At the same time we have a growing understanding of the harmful effects of air pollution on our health. Walking to school would not only make for healthier kids, it would reduce traffic and create a healthier, safer environment but we still drive our kids to school. This paper describes the initial design and development of UKKO, a novel persuasive game to encourage walking to school and engagement with local data. UKKO uses real time environmental data captured by the player to create a virtual environment for a digital pet. The more the student walks and avoids areas of high pollution the more healthy their pet.

The development of effective quality measures relevant to the future practice of BBC news journalism online

The BBC’s online news provision has been increasingly pressured by forces that are both internal and external to the corporation within recent years. In the light of this, the concern here is twofold. First, the aim is to produce a more comprehensive framework for the monitoring and evaluation of the quality of specific, key aspects of the corporation’s online hard news output than currently exists. It is intended to be usable not only by expert outsiders looking in at the BBC’s standards, but, with a little basic training, by the organisation’s editorial staff, should the corporation choose to consider its merits and agree its adoption. The second aim is to provide a means of helping maintain and increase the quality of the same key aspects of BBC news output at the stages of reporting and editorial decision-making within ongoing stories.

DataPet: designing a participatory sensing data game for children

A better understanding of our environment is vital if we are to make informed decisions about a diverse range of issues from transport to energy security. But at a local level, good quality data that could help inform and engage communities is in short supply. The primary sources project adopts concepts of participatory sensing to inform the development of a mobile based digital pet game for environmental data collection. This paper describes the initial participatory workshop leading to the design of a digital pet game, aimed primarily at children, that aims to explore the connection between open data collection and increasing community engagement.

DEMO: UAVs in crowd tagged mountain rescue

This project explores the potential for users to interact with live events in a new and dynamic way. It draws on fixed wing unmanned aircraft and associated sensor systems to provide real-time video and image data. It uses a web based software package as a crowd sourced imagery analysis tool allowing user involvement in the tagging and sorting of images. This technology allows a simulation of how the power of crowds [1] could be combined with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to monitor video footage and identify areas of particular interest by interacting with live video. A test flight in collaboration with Patterdale Mountain Rescue is used. The system fosters active citizenship by connecting communities to real life, live events in open-source creative communities. It explores the barriers and potential for an entirely new capacity for users to choose the perspective and proximity of their view by interacting with images from a UAV through ambient media.